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BERNIE’S BAD NEWS

Date: May 15, 2025 -

SINCE GOLDHAWK revealed (see The Phoenix 9/1/25) that a number of companies established by boom-time builder Bernard McNamara were to be wound up, things have continued to go downhill fast for the one-time high-flyer, who appears to be running out of companies. Bernie was one of the biggest casualties of the property crash, having been… Read more »

‘IRISH TIMES’ LOSES SECTARIAN DEBATE

Date: May 1, 2025 -

Last week the Irish Times lost a Press Council appeal against a Press Ombudsman’s decision. It is, for the paper, a disastrous outcome and vindicates The Phoenix’s criticism of the Irish Times’s failure to detail sexual abuse of Protestant children. The successful complainant, Dr Niall… Read more »

PROFILE: LIZ KEARNEY

Date: May 1, 2025 -

THERE WAS a time when the incoming editor of the biggest-selling newspaper in the country would already be known to many in the public via print or broadcasting media but the newly appointed Sunday Independent editor, Liz Kearney, is unknown to even many working journalists. Outgoing editor Alan English is a hard act to follow… Read more »

YOUNG BLOOD: EOIN HAYES

Date: May 1, 2025 -

ALAS, ALL political careers end in failure but minister Eoin Hayes has turned Enoch Powell’s old adage on its head and begins his political career with failure. In a state of suspense, however, Hayes is hanging in there with hopes of becoming a Social Democrats TD again. Before the series of events that resulted in… Read more »

BUCK HOUSE COVER-UP

Date: May 1, 2025 -

PRINCE ANDREW became a severe embarrassment to Buckingham Palace after sordid details of his sexual exploitation of Virginia Giuffre (neé Roberts) emerged in 2018. Giuffre has just taken her own life in Australia, aged 41. She was trafficked to the duke by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell when she was 17. Giuffre was commanded to… Read more »

CONOR McGREGOR’S PALS

Date: May 1, 2025 -

DESPITE THE rallying effect that Conor McGregor is having on the new-right scene and his close association with Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson, he is not admired by everyone on the right. Gript editor John McGuirk has not only resisted the gravitational forces of wealth and celebrity that keep the rabble gathered around McGregor in… Read more »

BRENDAN McDONAGH’S RECORD

Date: May 1, 2025 -

THERE WAS no explanation forthcoming from the housing department to Goldhawk’s query about any plan to advertise – or rather not advertise – the lucrative role of head of the new Housing Activation Office, currently earmarked for the boss of Nama, Brendan McDonagh. Maybe he is simply the best man for the job but the… Read more »

TOM McFEELY’S RECEIVER

Date: May 1, 2025 -

IN RECENT times, not an awful lot has been heard here about former IRA hunger striker turned boom-time property developer turned bankrupt Tom McFeely but that could be about to change. The erstwhile Ailesbury Road denizen has spent much of his time across the Irish Sea in the last couple of years but a defunct… Read more »

NOEL KELLY’S PET PROJECT

Date: May 1, 2025 -

WHATEVER HAPPENED to Petfix Club, the expensive website set up by some familiar faces to give “affordable trustworthy and high quality online veterinary and wellness advice” to pet owners. The name most closely associated with the venture was celebrity vet and ISPCA chairman Peter ‘Pete the Vet’ Wedderburn, although another big player turns out to… Read more »

VOL 43 NO 09

Date: May 1, 2025 -

BRENDAN MULLIN’S JUDGMENT

Date: May 1, 2025 -

A JUDGMENT has just been registered against Dublin builders John G Burns Ltd (trading as Burns Construction) for €35,000. The plaintiff here is one Brendan Mullin, with an address in Donnybrook, D4, but these days he is more likely to be found in Shelton Abbey open prison in Co Wicklow. Mullin, a former Irish and… Read more »

ROCKET SCIENCE

Date: May 1, 2025 -

THE MEDIA’S alarmingly war-like recruitment officers for Irish military involvement in western armies often resort to sarcasm at what they describe as the paranoid fantasies of Ireland’s pacifist and pro-neutrality activists. These are routinely dismissed as examples of ‘the boy who cried wolf’ and their exaggerated claims about Irish neutrality being undermined with every foreign… Read more »

NOT SINCE THE BLUESHIRTS…

Date: May 1, 2025 -

As anti-immigration protesters gathered at the Garden of Remembrance on Saturday April 26, it was clear from early on that this was going to be the biggest march that Ireland’s new right-wing networks have organised to date, with the hype around Conor McGregor a large factor. Close to 10,000 marched. But the fact that many… Read more »

GET BACK

Date: May 1, 2025 -

GIVEN KNEECAP’S recent troubles with British police and media, along with Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Tory party leader Kemi Badenoch, it will be interesting to see how film maker Sam Mendes, currently preparing to make films about each of The Beatles, handles the radical politics… Read more »

RACING UNCERTAINTY

Date: May 1, 2025 -

NOT SURPRISINGLY, there has been plenty of comment on the €300,000 winning bet placed with Ladbrokes by stable lad Dylan Phelan, for which he has yet to be paid a cent. Interestingly though, whatever the final outcome may be (the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board is carrying out its own inquiry) it is hard to see… Read more »

VIRTUAL WAR BUT REAL MONEY

Date: May 1, 2025 -

When VRAI Simulation recently launched its new office in Orlando, Florida, it hyped up the significance of the move with copious references to its clients and partners in the western military world. VRAI has developed a niche for itself in Ireland’s technology sector, specialising in producing virtual reality content that is used in training simulators… Read more »

THE HOT AIR BRIGADE

Date: May 1, 2025 -

What was most extraordinary about him was how the words seemed to enter him. Viscerally. Quietly. It struck me that I had never seen words being accepted in the same way. Colum McCann on Pope Francis, Irish Independent You should be a cardinal, if not the Pope…We’re still rooting for you. Miriam O’Callaghan to Sr… Read more »

CLIMATE NEUTRALITY ‘WISHFUL THINKING’

Date: May 1, 2025 -

When it comes to Ireland’s energy transition, “wishful thinking needs to be replaced by the realities of engineering, finance and project delivery”. So said the Irish Academy of Engineering (IAE) in a recent report on Ireland’s efforts to be climate neutral by 2050. In short, it can’t be done, says the IAE so, instead, they… Read more »

‘IT’ HOT AIR

Date: May 1, 2025 -

While there is no future in fossil gas, the outlook is equally bleak for biomethane, a highly problematic gas that increasingly looks like a solution in search of a subsidy. One US study found that to create $68 of biogas from cow’s manure cost nearly $300. Goldhawk was surprised to see a recent Irish Times… Read more »

NO POPERY IN LISBURN

Date: May 1, 2025 -

Easter Monday is traditionally the date of the first big loyalist parade in the north. This year it was the Apprentice Boys of Derry (ABOD), which may not be familiar to people in the south. First, none of them are boys. The ABOD was formed to commemorate the apprentices who closed the gates of Derry… Read more »

BLUESHIRTS CORK CIVIL WAR

Date: May 1, 2025 -

THERE IS a lot more than has been reported to that cross-party letter about the underfunding of the tenant-in-situ scheme, which was sent to the prematurely beleaguered housing minister, James Browne, last week and signed by various Cork City TDs and councillors. The row is essentially about the underfunding of the scheme that allows councils… Read more »

McDOWELL SAYS NO TO PRESIDENCY

Date: May 1, 2025 -

MICHAEL McDOWELL was pretty defiant when it was put to him in March that, with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael each intent on going it alone in the presidential election, there would be no dual-party backing for him in the contest. At the same time, FG decided it would not be adopting McDowell as its… Read more »

DONOHOE FOR EUROGROUP JOB?

Date: May 1, 2025 -

GROUP THINK in the media Greek chorus of the Irish financial establishment is that finance minister Paschal Donohoe only has to turn up in July to retain the splendid title of Eurogroup president. There are murmurings about the arcane, secretive voting procedures involved and rumours that impertinent continentals such as Spain’s finance minister, Carlos Cuerpo,… Read more »

VARADKAR V MARTIN

Date: May 1, 2025 -

FOR TAOISEACH and Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin to be battling with former taoiseach and Fine Gael leader Leo Varadkar over a united Ireland – with Martin preaching FG’s traditional line on the north and Vlad sounding like Squire Hockey – is intriguing. But the latest round between the two saw Vlad launch a polemic… Read more »

DISAPPEARANCE OF THE DISAPPEARED STORY

Date: May 1, 2025 -

WHATEVER HAPPENED to the crusade that began in January, when the Sunday Times launched its Forgotten Graves campaign to grant a proper burial to those killed and dumped in shallow graves in the conflict a century ago? John Mooney declared that the ST, MI5’s favourite newspaper, was “calling for the Irish government to recover these… Read more »

THE LATE LATE SHOW

Date: May 1, 2025 -

AN APPARENTLY non-descript and rather short story, informing Irish Times readers that Denis O’Brien had received nearly €6m for his Moriarty Tribunal legal costs, appeared on the bottom of page three of the newspaper of record last Friday. It stated: “Two separate sources have confirmed that the State Claims Agency paid €5.8m to Mr O’Brien… Read more »

NO TO ‘IRISH TIMES’!

Date: May 1, 2025 -

A DISAPPOINTED Irish Times was recently compelled to report that voters favoured retention of neutrality by over 2:1 but the good news for the paper’s Redmondites came with the same poll showing voters favoured rejection of the triple lock by 47% to 37%. Given the framing of the IT’s questions in the poll, undertaken by… Read more »

DENIS DESMOND’S MUSIC NOTES

Date: May 1, 2025 -

THERE HAS been yet more fine-tuning of the corporate set up at LN-Gaiety Holdings, the utterly dominant concert and music venue joint venture between Denis and Caroline Desmond’s Gaiety Investments and US giants Live Nation. The latest accounts filed for UK-registered LN-Gaiety Holdings reveal a profit in 2023 of £32.7m, which was down from £37.4m… Read more »

REBECCA’S FAIRYTALE

Date: May 1, 2025 -

HAITI COULEURS, trained by Rebecca Curtis, showed his rivals a clean pair of heels when running away with Ireland’s richest national hunt race, the €½m Boylesports Irish Grand National, under UK champion jump jockey Sean Bowen. The result was especially sweet for the rider after Cheltenham disappointment and also for the winner’s trainer. Having been… Read more »

WILLIE’S WIN

Date: May 1, 2025 -

EVEN THOUGH Dan Skelton had led Willie Mullins going into the final day of the UK National Hunt Championship at Sandown, there was a sense of inevitability about the final outcome, even when things did not start smoothly for the Closutton team. The horsebox carrying half of Mullins’s Sandown runners suffered an early morning malfunction… Read more »

PATRICK DORAN’S SUPPORT

Date: May 1, 2025 -

IT IS slow ahead on Shrewsbury Road in D4, where aircraft leasing moneybags Aengus Kelly and his wife, Deirdre O’Malley, are looking to build a “super-home” by combining Nos 5 and 7. The next-door neighbours, however, are keeping very quiet despite the concerns expressed by planners. The council raised a number of issues when seeking… Read more »

D6 DENIZENS

Date: May 1, 2025 -

IT WAS reported by the Sindo that “the well-heeled denizens of Palmerston Road in Dublin 6” would be raising a toast on foot of news that one of the piles on the salubrious thoroughfare had been put up for sale with a guide price of €2.86m and was snapped up for an impressive €3.3m. In… Read more »

OFFLOADING PEMBROKESTOWN HOUSE

Date: May 1, 2025 -

WITH A price tag of just on €3m, following a “remarkable renovation”, including a “showstopping swimming pool”, the impressive early 19th-century Pembrokestown House outside Butlerstown, Co Waterford, has arrived on the market. The 4,700 sq ft Regency villa turns out to be owned by legal eagle Michelle Beatty and her ophthalmologist hubby, Stephen, who were… Read more »

DALTON PHILIPS’S AUDACIOUS TAKEOVER BID

Date: May 1, 2025 -

GREENCORE’S AGREED £1.2bn takeover of the Icelandic-founded British Bakkavor convenience food company has a certain air of déjà vu. The company previously spent almost $1bn expanding into the US, only to sell out two years later in 2018 for the same price. Following the US retreat, current CEO Dalton Philips is doubling down on the… Read more »

KINGSPAN’S MYSTERIOUS SETBACKS

Date: May 1, 2025 -

THE FINAL report on the Grenfell Tower disaster was published by Martin Moore-Bick last September. While Kingspan was only a bit player, it has continued to suffer reputational damage when the tragedy features in the media. Moreover, there will be quarterly reports on the implementation of the inquiry’s 46 recommendations. But it is far from clear… Read more »

DES MCGAHAN’S DES RES

Date: May 1, 2025 -

A YEAR on from Goldhawk’s last look at the impressive Ballinacurra House outside Kinsale – where one Michael Jackson previously enjoyed a sojourn – the property is finally set to be sold, with an online auction to take place later this month. Last year, the Georgian pile on 23 acres (and including a coach house,… Read more »